The original Epstein? FBI is holding thousands of files on Detroit millionaire and his sinister island

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North Fox Island looks idyllic from the air – shaped like a teardrop, dense with forest and edged with sandy shores. It’s surrounded by the cold blue waters of Lake Michigan and located 19 miles off the coast of the Leelanau Peninsula.

In the 1970s, the uninhabited island belonged to Francis “Frank” Shelden, a Detroit millionaire with a Yale degree, a prestigious family name, and a reputation as a philanthropist.

Shelden bought the island from a widow for $20,000 and carved out an airstrip, dug miles of dirt trails, and built cabins deep into the woods. Transportation to and from the island was, and still is to this day, limited. The island - just two miles wide and one mile long - could have been considered paradise.

But investigators later uncovered the island’s disturbing purpose – an elaborate child sexual abuse ring operating behind the front of a summer camp for disadvantaged boys.

The only arrest was of Shelden’s co-conspirator, Gerald Richards. Richards was a gym teacher who moonlighted as a magician. The operation on the island was exposed when one of his students told their mother about inappropriate conduct by Richards in gym class.

open image in gallery The case of Frank Shelden and North Fox Island has haunting similarities to the Jeffrey Epstein saga which has come under renewed public scrutiny this year ( AP )

Richards pleaded guilty to charges of first-degree criminal sexual conduct and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. But Shelden, who reportedly got word from another co-conspirator that the police were investigating, fled the country. He was never caught.

The secret operation, disguised as Brother Paul’s Children’s Mission, was promoted as a retreat or summer camp for boys. But an investigation later uncovered evidence that these boys were transported to the island by private plane for depraved sex acts. The number of victims is unknown, but authorities believe there are at least dozens, if not hundreds.

The case has haunting similarities to the Jeffrey Epstein saga, which has come under renewed public scrutiny this year. The Trump administration has released millions of files on the late financier’s sex trafficking operations of unde